Libratus pulled ahead early, leading by a little more than $74,000 on the first day of play and by more than twice amount by Day 2.

"This is quite nice given that in advance of the event the international betting sites considered us a 4:1 or 5:1 underdog," wrote Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and lead developer on the Libratus system, in an email to Computerworld.

By the seventh day of the tournament, Libratus had increased its overall lead to $231,329 in chips.

"My assumption would be the longer the game goes on, the more information the A.I. gets and the better it becomes," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research. "For humans, poker is a combination of skill, intuition and emotion. With the A.I., it's based on learned information and data.... Poker is a good game [to test A.I. against humans] because you play the other players as much as you play the cards. Black Jack is more a pure numbers game, so it's not as good a "human versus machine" test."

According to Sandholm, poker has been an accurate measure of the power of A.I. since the earliest days of the technology because it's seen as even more complex than playing chess or the board game Go.

"Poker poses a far more difficult challenge than these games, as it requires a machine to make extremely complicated decisions based on incomplete information while contending with bluffs, slow play and other ploys," Sandholm said in a statement.

This is the second time that a Carnegie Mellon-built A.I. system has taken on human poker players. In 2015, the university ran the first Brains vs. A.I. contest using a different A.I. system. That first one was called Claudico, which Sandholm built as well.

Claudico did not win that challenge and collected fewer chips than three of the four professionals it played.

Kerravala, though, has high hopes for the A.I. system to come out ahead of this second ternament.

"I'm more surprised the computer has lost some ground but that may be the pattern as it learns how the others are playing," he said. "Over a long period of time, I would expect the A.I. to win. The longer the game goes on, the more data the A.I. has and the scales tip in its favor."

PCW Evaluation Team

As the Maserati or BMW of laptops, it would fit perfectly in the hands of a professional needing firepower under the hood, sophistication and class on the surface, and gaming prowess (sports mode if you will) in between.

This small mobile printer is exactly what I need for invoicing and other jobs such as sending fellow tradesman details or step-by-step instructions that I can easily print off from my phone or the Web.

Microsoft Office continues to make a student’s life that little bit easier by offering reliable, easy to use, time-saving functionality, while continuing to develop new features that further enhance what is already a formidable collection of applications

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